The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor

would also see people who “just looked illegal” pedaling bikes. Once, Jesse watched a familiar cycling club ride Monument Road to the beach, a passing whir of color. On their way back out of the valley, he spotted a lone rider in work clothes turn from a dirt lane out of one of the canyons, and then merge into the pack as they sprinted off toward the I-5 freeway. Some of the migrants might have been picked up by people on horseback, as had happened in the past with foot crossers. But there were obviously migrants whorode out to the river as well, leaving bikes on the banks before wading through the wetlands and into the north.
    â€œIt was like an explosion,” Gomez said.
    Jesse and David didn’t hunt bikes off of their own property and they didn’t sell the ones they found. The wheels just presented themselves, to a point of annoyance. A bearded Border Field State Park ranger once stopped by in a pickup and off-loaded bikes he’d found, as if their place were the depot. Then again, Jesse Gomez did come upon his neighbor, Terry Tynan, who looked to be scavenging on the Gomez hillside. “Matter of fact, I had to kick him off the property,” Gomez said.
    The phenomenon did not dissolve the rules of the neighborhood. Picking things up wasn’t new. There had always been backpacks and excess clothing tossed aside by passers-through. Plastic shopping bags fluttering on the road’s shoulder contained hairbrushes, razors, soap, deodorant, makeup—everyday toiletries essential for long trips. These packages likely belonged to migrants who’d been intercepted. Abandoned items read as clear and simple descriptions of the neighborhood’s nighttime traffic. But this latest trend brought something else in its wake: looky-loos, people covetous of anything free, people crazy about bikes.
    By the time Zúñiga discovered the bicycles on the Gomez place, the family had already donated a big batch to Father Joe’s, a homeless services provider in downtown San Diego. Extended family members had been outfitted with the appropriate bikes. Jesse Gomez’s immediate family all liked the beach cruisers. Which was not a problem; they’d been descending into the valley for nearly two years. But the best bicycles—GTs and Treks—had been donated to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These bikes had been specifically selected for the young Mormon missionaries who rode them house to house spreading the gospel. Gomez was proud of the fact that he could outfit them, because he believed he had benefited from themissionaries’ teachings himself. It was an image I particularly liked, too. Clean-cut young men in white shirts and dark ties coasting along on bikes that had violated the sovereignty of the United States—wheels that had served one pilgrimage now serving another.
    Zúñiga’s piece was titled “A Vehicle for Quick Crossing.” At the heart of her reporting was this sentence: “No one is sure exactly when the border-bike phenomenon began or why.” These were probably the two most important questions to be found in the front-page story. But they went unanswered. And even the nascent search for clues seemed to become muted and lost amid all the shiny new artifacts in the valley—simple queries drowned in the hubbub emitted by people attracted to the bikes themselves.
    â€œAfter that newspaper story came out,” Gomez said, “we just got flooded with people looking for bikes, looking for parts, just looking, looking.”
    Tall and thin with her gray hair pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck, Maria Teresa Fernandez presented a quiet, almost reverential disposition. Her elegantly accented English and way of choosing artistic metaphors extended the impression—it was an aura that served her work as much as it contrasted with the hardscrabble landscape she delved into. After years of watching the boundary